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my grandparents were worried my mum was 'getting lost' in books when she was a little girl and that reading too much would make her mentally ill. She just always encouraged my reading and video-game hobbies because she had bad memories with her books being taken away as a kid and i remember as a kid when she defended my gaming by comparing it to how her reading hobby had been treated
Warstar well, there is a reason that the baby boomers are all a little cracked and the world will be better off when that generation no longer holds sway.
Lukkilikka I actually had a very s similar thing happen to me when I was younger. Instead of being grounded I would have my reading light taken away and my books would get locked up. It was also partially because I wasn’t interested in tv
I literally use video games (rpg's mainly) to keep up on reading. I get to keep my hands and brain entertained, and I learn lore. That's why I love Fallout and Skyrim so much. In game books, and journals to read.
Research on video games is so frustrating to follow. So much of it is made by people who can only see video games as a factor in a cause-and-effect relationship, yet skill, time playing, habit-creating, and overall effect of specific genres on players are either poorly defined or completely ignored. Hopefully over time more people who know what the medium is start participating in experiments, and create better data to inform policy making.
I agree. Cause and effect is a very outmoded way of viewing and describing any problem. It presupposes that their is not a correlative association with numerous difference factors. Even in physics people have stopped describing systems in terms of cause and effect long ago, because it's far too simple a relationship to describe an outrageously complex system. Applying it here, is just lazy armchair-Behaviorism.
You might find it encouraging to look up Jennifer Hazel, RxPixel on twitter. She and her team have collected a lot of the good news about gaming in a therapeutic context especially, among other things.
FPS multiplayer people seem fair to put in the gaming addiction thing and I'm talking about those people in youtube videos where they get violent when you even touch the console
As someone who was doing some stuff with video game research in college, it's a bit more complicated than that. tl;dr is that Pat's got mostly the right idea, and video game just happen to enable someone who's already fucked up somehow. There's nothing inherent about video game "rush" that makes people more messed up than movies or sports. Even the violent and interactive aspect of it doesn't quite affect it that much in the long run.
Before video games, I was legitimately obsessed with reading books. My middle school made books addictive via making them more appealing and having a library that brought about another vibe than the school (dimmed lights, better architecture and visually pleasing because it doubled as the school’s basement storage) They introduced books to me and was immediately hooked because [insert introverted thought process] and it got so bad that my teachers were worried because I was actively ignoring kids and teachers alike. But they couldn’t say anything because I was in the top three best students every year and doing work fast just to read more
Walter Miller same here, no lie I ended up reading over half my library in middle school, reading prob 1500-1700 pages a day for two years. Didn't help my mom was the librarian at the time.
Yeah, pretty similar thing here. I'm actually fucking happy as hell that I was so involved in books that it actually hurt my ability to function in school. Sure getting C's on my report card and A's on my tests sucked, but what started out as escapism (fiction books like Series of Unfortunate Events, Cirque Du Freake, and Clive Barker shit) eventually expanded into my collection of history books and nonfiction from damn near every culture I could get my hands on.
Humanity isn't S-tier species because we are super intelligent. Humanity is S-tier species because we can actively multitask, and sometimes we stack all of that on intelligence and break the game. God made monsters and djinn and angels to balance patch us, but we already made monsters and djinn obsolete. No one plays angels anymore. Spec into capitalism, spec out of nukes.
I think it’s the idea of just escapism that is really addictive. With me I spend whole days just listening to music as if they’re parts of an OST to some fantastical life scenario. The problem with labeling someone as being a “escape addict” is well how in the hell are you supposed to treat that? Try your hardest to show what the real world has to offer? And what do you do when that doesn’t work? It’s very complex but a serious thing to consider.
I agree with Pat. It's people who have a natural addictive behavior to begin with, not the source itself. I mean I've played games since i was 5, yet here i am holding a job, a social life, working out, ECT. without having to be forced to do them. Why? Because i know moderation, and understand that passing my life away and my health in favor of a "high score" is not a good idea.
I don't do it for a high score. I do it for the story. I stop caring about anything else... I just need to know what happens next. It was the same with books when I was younger. My parents limited my game time, but books were free, so I read pretty much all day everyday
Yeah man, Its not difficult to balance your life out, even with videogames. I wake up, have a shower and go to work. Then I get back home, have a few drinks and cry while playing videogames. You can be a fully functioning adult with a little effort.
I don't really agree. I know someone who fell into a massive gambling debt that was always very moderate and responsible in every facet into his life, didn't make sense at all to me when I heard about it, but where I live gambling is very big and unregulated so societal behaviour may play a big part. Something being addictive doesn't mean you have a character flaw. I also have this thankfully avoidable problem with reading, I've been obsessed with finishing even a really bad book or something similar while I have important things I should be doing, and I know damn well I'm a responsible and moderate person. It's why I barely read books now, I like games more and I'll drop them in an instant if I need to do something. I've never fallen into a terrible addiction before, but I'm not special and the reason I haven't isn't because I'm a well adjusted human being (it's part of it mind), truth is we're just lucky sometimes.
the official article talks about "gaming disorder" and makes parallels with gambling disorder, there is no actual mention of it being equated with addiction and it seems more like a very broad term just given the category of "gaming" officially recognized. I take this as not "videogames officially an addiction source", rather "grandpa finally knows what videogames are so search terms are being updated". Also they mentioned that the actual prevalence of people that would even be classified as having this disorder is VERY low, so generally anyone that's getting defensive about this are very likely not those who have it.
Well, no. Cause "the man" wants to talk about video games and not about tv or videos in general, cause video games are the newest medium and the newest threat to older forms of media.
Not exactly. I mean yes, that's part of it. But there are more factors than that. It's like Woolie tried to get at, there are more factors than just the escapism that make a game addiction happen. As it stands, younger psychologists who grew up with games are going to understand this and be able to treat and diagnose this specific addiction. Because let's be real, treating someone who is addicted to rolling Love Live gacha versus someone addicted to speedrunning or to raiding in mmos is all going to be different. These things fill different holes and they need to be treated differently. Seeing specific labels that narrow addictions down is useful for behavioral therapists and other psych fields. Now, there's a lot of danger with this kind of thing,largely from People With Agendas who want to try to Sink Big Gaming because its Corrupting The Youth. But nonetheless, it's a tool. But so is a hammer. A hammer can help build a house or bash a face in.
Man, when Matt talked about how Animal Crossing was messing with him missing tests and stuff, I related so hard with college. I was fully focused on FF7R and P5R, I couldn’t work on ANYTHING the whole month of April. I definitely feel I have a problem, but I’m gonna try to change. I miss these guys so damn much.
I feel like I'm being a little too negative with this comment but eventually everybody dies so it really doesn't matter if a few people die a little sooner or a little later. We all have our own stupid obsessions that nobody will give a damn about 5 years after you've died.
i like these conversations, because i get to bring up that late 1800's, early 1900's article that said "reading books stunts your familial connections and disrupts social cohesion", because that was the start of public literacy, so condemn the books. fearmongering is the oldest tactic there is, and feel free to slap that in people's faces when they attempt to fearmonger against games.
When I was between 10-14 half the kids in my class dedicated their entire lives to football/soccer. They watched every game (Be It the state championship, National, inter-american, european) and that was the only Topic of conversation they could come up with. In PE, they would only play football and If anyone wanted anything else they would start a fight. After School, they ram to the field and played till late night. Some of them even joined gangs of fans of their favorite teams and haressed rival fans. Never in my life I've heard of addiction to football.
By that logic I guess I was addicted to books as a kid, even more than them damn evil vidyuh gaymes now. As a kid I used to read so much that adults would _punish me by making me go outside and play._ I used to _read dictionaries for _*_fun._* Reading is addictive ban books protect the children.
I feel like people are becoming more and more lame as time goes on. A lot of people seem like they try to be too much of a goodie two shoes and the other half seem to have no ability to even fake being decent human beings. Then again I only really deal with people at work and avoid people as much as I can on my way home.
parker469a We live in a microwave society as my mother called it. Everything is so quick and convenient that theres really no need to care for interaction. Waaay Back in the day you depended on you’re friends/family to come up with shit to do. Now I have this phone that can give me the means of self sufficient dopamine hits or literally suggest or find ANYTHING for me to go do alone.
The skyrocketing population doesnt help either. I'd imagine it was easier to find people who didn't subscribe to any sort of cliques when the population of a single state wasn't large enough to populate an entire country just over 150-200 years ago. Was probably a lot more sincerity to go around when you only had, like, maybe 7 neighbours in a mile wide radius. As someone who is fully willing to admit he's an anti-social jackass, I can't help but notice how everybody nowadays seems to JUST talk about media trends without any sort conflict, ( at least in real life and not in reddit threads), Could also be, because that's a very "safe" way of making connections, but I honestly dont understand why its the ONLY way people are connecting now. I listen to this podcast almost every week, so of course I'm deep into "geek" culture, but's not what I want to base my ENTIRE life on. Whenever I meet someone in real life who present themselves as a "gamer" or "nerd", all I can think is " Whoopdee do, you spend your time sitting down drinking energy drinks". I dunno, maybe thats me being a jaded asshole, but I find people are becoming increasingly shallow over time.
Thomas Rozhon Yeah ppl are becoming almost like a parody of what those old social stereotypes used to be(Geek, activist, introvert etc) . Also you aren’t the only one, irl it seems ppl are either showing me a trending vid ive already seen a thousand times or they are quoting some dumb ass post about relationships or success.
I don’t think people can get addicted to video games but rather the distraction, immersion, and escapism that video games provide. However, that can be applied to anything such as comics, movies, weed, porn, etc. anything that is distracting and provides a sense of safety and security at an instant can be and IS be very addicting. That being said, there are millions of people who see video games as their way of life rather than a small hobby and it’s quite concerning when you look at the gaming community as a whole and realize this.
I hate it when old conservative people that don't know anything about my hobbies talk trash about my hobbies. In 50 years when the give up machine is invented and "Are You Ready Player One?" becomes reality, I'm not gonna judge my grandkids for escaping reality to be in a better version of reality; I'm gonna agree with them and be all like "hey jimmy watcha playin and can I join in too?".
The thing is I don’t think I’m addicted to video games, I’m more an escapist, but I’m not quite sure if I’m addicted to escapism. You could spin it that way i guess.
It'd totally down to personality. I was addicted to books when I couldn't afford videogames, I'd spend 6 hours or more of my day reading, not doing homework, eating, sometimes even not properly sleeping. I read the first volume of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy in one 13 hour sitting.
You can get addicted to pretty much anything. Ever hear of soda addiction? What about the people who just like soda alot? TV shows and anime aren't all that different marathon stranger things no problem marathon any anime and suddenly addicted ? Weird
I think the reason video games are singled out is so many people spend time alone gaming that it reaches that point of addiction more often than like hockey where you go out with people and it becomes a group experience and you can get the socialization you need.
It's not being addicted to the specific story experience it's to the ability to escape into a different world and pretend you're someone else who doesn't have all the perceived flaws the person themselves think they have
There are a lot of Professional Psychologists who are not doctors. There's a big difference between psychology and psychiatry, which wil involve researching pathological sources of videogame addiction (if any exist). I don't think the one at fault is WHO. WHO is quite massive, well respected, reputable, and are known to change reports based on new information.
MartoLun i think it's hard to fault an international organization in general, there's too many people involved in too many remote regions around the world for anyone to be at fault for something slipping through or for something being declared "fact" without the most unbiased and rigorous testing possible.
I mean if you hold down a job, pay your bills, and don't disregard your commitments then who cares what you do with your free time? Seems like a pointless category to add to addictions.
The comparison to hockey addiction is pretty accurate I think, because of the way that things like the DSM are set up they allow room for cultural activities that are seen as normal to not be diagnosed as disorders. If you have a culture where it is seen as socially acceptable, or even encouraged, to get really into football or hockey then the people who pursue those interests aren't considered to be addicted or obsessed if its a normal level for the culture. I think that this is why there has been so much government pushback on videogames, because the younger generations are growing up in a culture where they are overly accepted while the older generations don't see them around them in everyday life as much.
Matt, I can 100% understand where you are coming from with that Animal Crossing story. People may laugh that off as ridiculous, but that sort of mental recalibrating is legitimate. I even dealt with that last semester in college. Granted, it was with video games, but the medium itself isn't the inherent issue. It was a matter of shifting my secondary tasks (in this case, video games) as my primary focus while finding excuses to brush off actual responsibilities (seeing friends, going to class, etc.). Tasks in life were evaluated based on how they would detract from me playing video games. My grandmother broke her hip this summer, and while visiting her I thought, "Okay. I don't care. She doesn't even know who I am with her darn dementia. She's taking time away from me fighting through Hard Mode in Terraria." It sounds ridiculous, selfish, uncaring, and short-sighted, but that's what the "addiction" did to me and can do to many others regardless of their medium of "choice". I'm doing better now, but falling back into those habits is easier than you could imagine. You think you can control and moderate your own addiction. You can't. You absolutely can't. Sorry for this long comment. Just thought I'd show some support.
Coming from a family with addictive personality prevalence, and having inherited that, I appreciate this dialogue. It's super legit. I have fears and anxieties that keep me from drinking or recreational drug use, sure. But that doesn't mean I'm without addictive vices at all, and it's all psychological. I liken it to obsessive compulsivity sometimes, as well. It really does need to be treated more as a disorder or something unique to the person, because you can absolutely be addicted without physical dependency
I like how know matter how close you feel to it being a mental disorder, or how many tests you can take It is always completely possible that it will be brought up as "maybe I'm just a deep seeded asshole"
That Knuckles and Rouge guy sounds like some dude that also had a similar obsession to Ryu X Chun Li, even writing a 300 page comic dedicated to the ship
Their discussion around the 12-minute mark remind me of the incredibly morbid factoid about suicide rates in 19th-century England; they went waaaay up upon the introduction of the gas-powered oven, because early models made it so easy to flood your house with gas and suffocate yourself painlessly. When they started rolling out newer models that couldn't be used to asphyxiate, suicide rates went back down. For a higher percentage of the population than we'd like to admit, ANY easy escape hatch is really tempting, whether it's drugs, antisocial behaviors, self-harm, or outright suicide.
This kind of thing scares me honestly, I have an addictive personality and had infact been addicted to the internet when I was younger. I spend hours playing videogames everyday (of course I can stop to do whatever like chores or work) and thinking about this being a possible addiction is scary as fuck and depressing as shit.
Pat and Woolie shitting on Yukari: "Ok I can understand the reasons they dislike this character even though it makes me salty because I think they're dumb reasons." Pat dissing Potemkins redesign: "I will Potemkin Buster your soft, shitty body you tiny man."
Small correction on the coke thing: Some friends of mine that know more than I do say that rubbing it on the gums is more to test purity as you can better sense a numbing effect on your gums.
Anything can become an addiction in a sense. If something gives you that dopamine hit, you'll want more from where that came from. I mean heck, people get addicted to internet fights because it gives them a bit of a rush, . Are there more often than not underlying causes to getting very attached to something? Of course there are. While in my last years of high school I was actually addicted to World of Warcraft - neglecting schoolwork, friendships, relationships with my family. But it wasn't the game that was the problem, it was just an outlet for then undiagnosed ADHD and mild Aspergers, and playing that game made me feel better than having to interact with real people as it gave the illusion of socialisation without the stressful interactions, and there was a pretty good hit of dopamine whenever I finally grinded enough for that one special mount or shit like that.
Most psychological disorders are defined by whatever it is negatively affecting different aspects of your life (social/familial/work/hygiene) and usually some aspect of feeling negatively towards it. So if your video gaming habits cause you to lose your job, ends a relationship, along with you wanting to stop your negative habits but continuing anyway, then I think it's fair in that case to call it a mental disorder.
@thesw1tcher It's not super on-topic, but if it helps, Woolie mentioning countries where eating disorders aren't as prevalent as they are in Western countries may have been a reference to a specific study! after TV was introduced to a province in Fiji in the mid-1990s, the rate of eating disorders went way up, and there was a lot of subsequent writing about how that reflected on TV in the US also culture-bound syndromes in general are examples of fear/anxiety/anger/etc. coming out in patterns that mainly show up in specific countries :O idk this may be info Pat would be interested in
~ 3:20. Yeah, that'd be the dopamine release you get from all things that people find joy out of. It's all natural, but can lead to psychological addictions (differing from addictions in the strain of nicotine, alcohol, etc. More similar to the video game, marijuana sort of addictions.)
The big problem with gaming addiction is that these researchers are happy to tar every game with the same brush. Truthfully, games are for escapism. Before games, we had comics, before those, books, and before those, hobbies. There were things that came before games that were addictive, hell even trading cards and the socioeconomic ideology behind trading, gambling, battling, planning, etcetera. Most kids in most schools will still be into the whole trading card or trading figure fanaticism, even with modern technologies. The fact is, the only reason we can see technology has become an issue is because we have the advancements in technology capable of monitoring these things. If it wasn't for the fact that pretty much anything you can do on a modern device can be monitored, none of this would be a factor. Ultimately, there are also finer mechanics in certain games, to coin the term "Pavlovian" or "Skinner boxes" where there is an interaction and a conditioned reward. MMORPG's and RPG's particularly bad for these kinds of tactics. You also have gambling for lootboxes, and random drops within games like borderlands, world of Warcraft, etc. Its bullshit because these elements are being applied to games as a whole and it is just bad. Sometimes, there are people who feel so upset or downtrodden by life that the idea of technological escapism is their driving force, and everything else is just much of a muchness. Just my opinion though.
I think there is an absolutely fascinating study waiting to be put forth in the coming years over whether the interactivity and innate sense of self and control video games as a medium has is more dangerous for people with addictive personalities then other mediums, but this study is not it.
I wanna inject those video games straight into my veins Gimme that sweet sweet data straight into my body to permanently change my body chemistry. If I don't get my fix of vidya my nerves will itch and I'll be violently ill.
